Why read The Taming of the Samurai?

Book cover of The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan

Book description

Modern Japan offers us a view of a highly developed society with its own internal logic. Eiko Ikegami makes this logic accessible to us through a sweeping investigation into the roots of Japanese organizational structures. She accomplishes this by focusing on the diverse roles that the samurai have played in…

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Asian history

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Taming of the Samurai as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Viren Murthy

Author

I found this book a creative addition to the books that attempt to find the origins of modernity in East Asia before contact with the West. Rather than looking at nationalism, Ikegami examines the individualism embedded in the ethics of the samurai. She then shows how starting with Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s ban on swords in the late sixteenth century and the eventual consolidation of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1603, such individualism had to be curbed or transformed. From this perspective, early modernity in Japan was associated with the emergence of a centralized state that ruled out certain forms of spontaneous aggression,…

From Viren's list on profoundly understanding modern East Asian thought.